Surface Pro ships with only 23KB free or less than a single floppy!

[cunnpole]

Nonsense. You don't need that much data space. For me 8 Gb would last a life time!

Some of us do back them up and don't have useful portable internet and like to tinker on the go. The 15" laptop is a bit bulky to carry everywhere (unlike the tf101 which is always nearby)

[cunnpole]

But isn't the ipad almost impossible to transfer data? It's not like you can just plug in a storage device using usb. At least as far as i know. I don't use Apple stuff.

It's not simple by my parents standard (unless were talking about itunes media), but using it as a usb drive on a pc is easy for more technical folks. Also dropbox (resync when you get home) and like make it easy to transfer stuff. I prefer android devices as most have host usb slots allowing connection of everything from 3TB usb drives to 3g dongles.

[cunnpole]

iOS devices automatically backup to the Apple iTunes cloud server

I hope you make your own backups too considering how many of these cloud companies (apple and dropbox included) have lost their users data. They give very little in the way of guarantees, even to their paid customers.